In well-respected European newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph, The Independent and Der Spiegel, you could read an alarming story about a kind of Swedish imperialism towards her smaller Scandinavian cousin, Denmark.

Citing Danish academics, the Telegraph reports that the Swedish furniture giant, Ikea, deliberately named lesser product lines such as doormats, runners and draught excluders after Danish towns, whereas beds and chairs - perceived to be higher up in the hierarchy of furniture - are named after Norwegian towns. The really high-end products (if such exist at Ikea) are named after Swedish places and towns.

You can imagine the hurt national pride and the rush of blood that I, as a Dane, felt when reading this. How dare they, those Swedes? Three hundred and fifty years after taking Scania away from the Danish empire, and after having beaten us at football for decades, now this: doormats named after Danish towns!

Somehow the story sounded too good to be true. And since the Telegraph story carried quotations from a well-respected Danish author and researcher, Klaus Kjoller, I did what both the Telegraph and Der Spiegel should have done and phoned Kjoller. It turned out the story was not quite as expected.

Hans Christian Andersen once wrote a fairy tale in which a hen loses a feather and the incident is turned into a disaster by gossip and word of mouth. The fairy tale sums up the Ikea imperialism story. According to both the Telegraph and Der Spiegel, Kjoller is supposed to have carried out research alongside a Danish colleague, Troels Myhlenberg, on the IKEA catalogue's deliberate degradation of Denmark. The supposed conclusion is that Sweden symbolically portrays Denmark as the doormat of Sweden.

The only problem is that there never was any research - neither by the two men in question, nor by anyone else. A Danish journalist from Nyhedsavisen, a free Danish tabloid paper, called Kjoller a few weeks ago asking if he had noticed the use of Danish town names in the Ikea catalogue. Kjoller had not, but he happily played along and for fun lampooned the Swedes. He was very surprised to see the story blown up on the cover of the newspaper the following day, but even more surprised by what happened next.

"Over the last week I have had calls from all sorts of media companies who wanted to interview me about Ikea's symbolic imperialism," he says. "Belgian and German papers have called, as has BBC World, and they were all disappointed that I had to deny the reports. Still the story has now featured in numerous papers around the world, it makes you wonder why no one has bothered to check out the facts of the story before printing it".

Kjoller is quite right, of course. There is something rotten - and not only in the state of Denmark.

As for the relationship between Denmark and Sweden, it is actually quite good. No doubt that there is intense rivalry - a contest that the Swedes, alas, often win. The bad blood dates back to the Swedish national team's visit to Copenhagen last autumn to play a Euro 2008 qualifier. The Swedes quickly took a 3-0 lead, but the Danish team managed to claw its way back and after equalising in the second half should have taken the lead. Instead, Danish blood boiled over, Christian Poulsen hit a Swedish player and was sent off, but the following penalty was never taken. The referee left the pitch and Denmark was disqualified. Maybe we deserve to have our towns named after doormats!

Copenhagen is the place where the notoriously correct and dull Swedes go to have fun, and while the people of Copenhagen may get tired of drunken Swedes, in general the atmosphere is quite good. Many Swedes go to Copenhagen to study and the sons of the boss of Ikea, Ingvar Kamprad, even speak Danish. All in all, this is a story about bad journalism magnified by foreign papers who couldn't be bothered to get the facts right. Denmark has no equivalent of Ikea, no ABBA and no Ingmar Bergman, but we do have Hans Christian Andersen and it feels appropriate to end this comment with his moral from the fairytale "There is no doubt about it":

"The hen that had lost the loose little feather naturally did not recognise her own story, and being a respectable hen, said: 'I despise those fowls; but there are more of that kind. Such things ought not to be concealed, and I will do my best to get the story into the papers, so that it becomes known throughout the land; the hens have richly deserved it, and their family too.'

"It got into the papers, it was printed; and there is no doubt about it, one little feather may easily grow into five hens."